Friday, 29 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At. < Part 9

Do you like plot twists?
You don’t? Tough shit, you have no taste, here’s Total Chaotix.

Thursday, 28 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At. < Part 8

While the Disaster arc was
being epic in the Sonic strip the comic still had three other strips per issue
to fill, and now two of those three were going to be set in Sonic’s world, we
still have a few more non-Sonic adaptations to go (Sparkster and Shinning Force
won’t be adapted until after this batch of issues, for instance) but as we move
towards issue 75 they’ll be more and more Sonic per issue (I think issue 79 was
the first issue where all the strips were Sonic’s world strips). That means
we’ll probably be seeing more of these, where two parts seem to cover the same
issues. The good news is that the Sonic & Knuckles adaptation marks the
beginning of the best period of stories the series has, a period that will
last, pretty much, right up until Sonic goes to the Special Zone (issue 84) –
when the Tails strips start to get really dodgy. And even after that, when
Stringer and Kitching decide the best way to explore the Special Zone is
through unfunny superhero parodies and the Tails stories become utterly
pointless filler, the Knuckles and Freedom Fighter strips will keep things
afloat, quality wise, up until the excellent issue 100. Anyway that’s a while
off; let’s get past 50 before we start thinking about 100.

Wednesday, 27 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At. < Part 7

The Disaster is upon us. I
am so excited to be re-reading this story. The Sonic strips covered here make
up the Sonic & Knuckles adaptation (with one filler) and I’m trying not to
hype the story too much in case anyone is reading these posts and wants to read
the story so let’s just get on with it.

Tuesday, 26 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At. < Part 6

These issues bridge the gap
between the Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles adaptations with mostly more
issues adapting parts of Sonic 3, hence the title – I am so fucking clever I
hurt.

Monday, 25 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

StC were pretty lucky in that they started adapting Sonic games with the first three titles to
have a narrative running through them, rather than a plot to set them up (Sadly
they never did a proper adaptation of Sonic Spinball, which also had a
narrative, and I’d’ve liked to have seen Richard Elson tackle Rexxon and
Scorpius) but it still takes a good, or rather appropriate, writer and artist
to take those narratives and turn them into stories that retain the epic and
exciting feel of playing the games. If you don’t believe me check out Archie’s
adaptations of Sonic CD, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (and Sonic Spinball
actually – issues 25, 13, the Sonic & Knuckles Special and issue 6
respectively), the Sonic 3 & Knuckles adaptations used the average writing
team of Ken Penders and Mike Kanterovich and teamed them with the totally
unsuitable Dave Manak for the most part, thus we got a fairly unexciting series
of scenes with fairly unexciting climaxes drawn by a scratchy comedy artist,
meanwhile the other two used totally unsuitable comedy writer Mike Gallagher
and for the Spinball adaptation Dave Manak again, so we got two scripts full of
horrible humour instead of a satisfying adaptation of the great games we got
all excited playing, the Sonic CD adaptation only being saved by having the
thoroughly talented and more so appropriate Pat Spaz on art, and even then
asking him to draw things like a giant reader’s finger poking Eggman was so
jarring compared to his exciting, dynamic drawings of the Stardust Speedway and
the Metal Sonic race that it half ruins it and was just insulting to the artist.
With Nigel Kitching, who took the source material seriously and wrote stories
appropriately, and Richard Elson, who is an excellent action strip artist, StC
had two talented and appropriate people working on their adaptations, and thus
what we got was excellent. I will say that I think the Sonic 3 adaptation is
the weakest of the adaptations pre-100 but given the story-arcs we’re talking
about here, being the weakest is…well…what’s the opposite of damning with faint
praise? Praising with faint damning? Something like that, anyway - to the
issues!

Friday, 22 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th
Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of
Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic
issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one
of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic
the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

Right, I was going to do
the Sonic 3 adaptation story-arc next, but I reconsidered and decided to do the
odds and ends instead because a) I realised I’d forgotten to do a strip b)
Pirate STC ends pretty much as that adaptation starts so it wouldn’t make much
sense to do it later c) If I keep putting off reviewing Pirate STC I’ll never
do it and d) Sonic Poster Mags.

We’ll start with what I
forgot: I realised when writing the BARF strip, the second Sonic’s World strip,
that I’d forgotten to do the first
Sonic’s World strip, which is just called Sonic’s World with no story
title.

Thursday, 21 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th
Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of
Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic
issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one
of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic
the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

For a few months we get a
slight shift in writers – Mark Eyles is taking over back-ups for the new Tails
strip and the second Sonic’s World strip while Lew Stringer is here for his
first (short) stint as Main Sonic Writer. I feel bad for marking Stringer out
as the weaker of the two Main Sonic Writers (always capitalised, always)
because he’s a really nice bloke with a far bigger career in British comics
than just Sonic the Comic, he created and drew both Tom Thug and The Dark Newt,
for instance and he is often a good
writer, though he does turn in more stinkers than Kitching will. But he is the weaker of the two – his dialogue
isn’t so good, his plots aren’t so good and he tends to involve fairly weak
humour when it’s not needed, that latter downside isn’t all his own fault
though; apparently there was several editorial mandates put in as the book went
on, one was that Amy was to be a girl power positive role model and the other
was that there should be more humour, as I understand it Kitching wasn’t
interested in doing either, so Lew got the job of fulfilling those requirements
in his strips – as he’d worked on typical Beano and Dandy humour strips before
he was probably better suited, I just don’t think that style of strip is well
suited for Sonic the Hedgehog, especially not when you’ve got big dramatic
world shaking stories going on in the Sonic strip (which is the first one in
the book remember), it’s jarring and makes the strips seem throwaway. Anyway
Stringer’s work is typified by:

·Shorter stories
with lower stakes (until Kitching is fired anyway)

·Groan-worthy
humour that isn’t without its charm at times.

·Amy Rose and/or
Shortfuse the Cybernik

·Parodying things
that children wouldn’t get.

·Not Richard Elson

I’d do one of those for
Mark Eyles too but really he’s just typified by being so similar to Kitching or
Stringer that I didn’t even know he existed until I started having this Look At
the book, I just thought he WAS
either Stringer or Kitching, that said he is far from a bad writer and has
created some of my favourite characters in the series. Anyway: to the issues!

Wednesday, 20 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th
Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of
Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic
issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one
of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic
the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

It’s here, it’s finally
here, after three entries and having to talk about Mark Millar’s crap one-off
stories and boring you with things you need to know but don’t really care about
the first Sonic the Comic epic has arrived to reward me and save you from
tedium. The Sonic Terminator arc (or Sonic
CD arc if you prefer) runs from issues 21 through 28 encompassing three Sonic
strip stories ‘Girl Trouble’ (21-22) ‘Pirates of the Mystic Caves’ (23) and
‘The Sonic Terminator’ (24-28), it further builds on what Kitching’s been doing
and introduces elements and characters that will be built on or used for years
to come, some right up until the end of the book and still manages to be a
pretty decent adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog CD.

Tuesday, 19 July 2016

This will be a completely spoiler free review, both for
the end of Attack on Titan season 1 and for anything that happens in the manga
afterwards, why am I being unusually considerate? Because if I put spoilers in
this at least two of my friends, possibly as many as six, will literally murder
me and I would like to stay unmurdered.

So last weekend I went to
Hyper Japan, London’s premiere Anime, Manga and Japanese Culture convention. It
was bloody hot and most of the day was spent allowing three of my friends to
show off their awesome Attack on Titan cosplay and be photographed by three
quarters of the hall – and for the friend cosplaying as Sasha to give out
potatoes (genius) - this would have been frustrating had they not looked so
bloody good (and it was one’s birthday, so we were duty bound to indulge her).
Shopping wise it was a bit of a bust, I was hoping to grab some Highschool of
the Dead, Sonic the Hedgehog and Azumanga Diaoh merch but there was nothing to
be found, as such it ended up being an all Attack on Titan spend-up and I
regret nothing. All of that leads to me introducing you to another quick crappy
review (sorry), so are you sitting comfortably? Then Seid ihr das Essen? Nein,
wir sind die Jäger!

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th
Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of
Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic
issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one
of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic
the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

With issue 18 we begin
juggling multiple multi-part strips and that means we have to start dealing
with things like ‘reading order’ and ‘continuity’ (as if these articles weren’t
long enough). At the moment it’s not so bad, we’ll only be dealing with one or
two strips a month as Fleetway continue to fool themselves in thinking fans
want to read anything but Sonic stories, but once all the non-Sonic strips have
been expunged it can get a bit complex. Hopefully you won’t notice too much
because I’ve chosen a layout style designed to reduce that (I’m such a nice
individual) but you may notice that the number of issues covered in each part
becomes quite uneven and that stories start or end outside of the issues in the
title. That’s because I’m mostly separating things up by the Sonic the Hedgehog
strip stories and so for arcs like the Sonic 3 or Sonic & Knuckles
adaptations or the Return of Chaotix that’s going to be quite a few issues
whereas other times, like this, we’ll only have a couple to go through between
major arcs. As for the issue numbers not
lining up, again it’s chosen by (mostly) the Sonic stories, and thus the
back-up stories will be put where the majority of the story falls, or just
where I think they fit best.

Anyway the series keeps
pretty good continuity, Kitchen and Stringer are pretty good at fitting things
together especially if they’re the ones writing the conflicting stories but the problems arise just from the general conflicts
that happen in having a character appear in up to three stories per book, all
of which are multi-parters – Tails simply cannot be in three places at once
having an adventure that lasts a couple of days each. I will go through them in
an order that seems natural to me, wherever possible I’ll try to get them in
chronological order but I’m not going to jump ahead 20 issues to talk about a
story that takes place during that timeframe, I’ll get to that when I get to
those issues. With all that shit out of way, let’s begin with the very first
Tails strip and what I’m now naming ‘Stuff Left Over From Last Entry’ or SLOFLE
(slow-full):

Monday, 18 July 2016

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th
Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of
Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic
issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one
of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic
the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.

As discussed in Part 1 the
dark secret of Sonic the Comic is that it’s first main writer was comics superstar
and unforgivable prick Mark Millar, thankfully the comic’s (possibly
unintentional) format of nearly always having two main writers for Sonic
stories meant that his crap was split up by much better stories from StC’s
second Main Writer - Nigel Kitching. From the start (and it’s not that grand a
start) Kitching writes Sonic as a serious hero in a serious adventure strip*, his reasoning being that readers took Sonic serious
as a hero regardless of him being a funny animal and thus the writer should too
(I agree) and that British readers wouldn’t take the DiC Cartoon/Archie style
class clown Sonic serious (I sort of agree). To put all the cards on the table
as it were I shall say that I consider Nigel Kitching to be the best writer
this franchise has ever had, both Ben Hurst and Ian Flynn come dangerously
close and Lew Stringer is no slouch either but none of them quite measure up to
Kitching’s work on StC and reading through them side-by-side as I have for many
years (and am now) the difference in the styles between Kitching and Stringer
are apparent even before Stringer was tasked to do more humour, Kitching’s
stories read like the American comic stories whereas Stringers always feel like
a Saturday morning cartoon. Kitching’s work is typified by:

·A strong sense of
continuity

·Sharp, natural
sounding dialogue

·Long, high stakes
adventures and even when the stakes aren’t that high threats that can be taken
seriously

·Engrossing, often
twisting, plots

·Richard Elson
and/or Nigel Dobbyn

Not all of that comes out in
his first strip though, ‘Day of the
Badniks’ ran in issue 4 and in fact I thought it was a Millar issue – but
reading again I can see it clearly isn’t, though Sonic is unnecessarily rude in
places and the art’s pretty amateurish (I just associate bad art on early StC
issues with Millar, sorry) you can see the Kitching to come poking through. We
have our first instance of continuity (‘Robofox’ is mentioned) and just
generally a story that feels more sensible, consistent and mature (three things
that Millar still hasn’t grasped yet). It’s also the first issue you actually
need to read, as it establishes Robotnik as based in the Special Zone. Kitching
comes back a lot stronger with issue 6’s ‘Attack

on the Death Egg’ and the first (of only two) StC trade paperbacks chose to
begin reprinting from this issue (a good choice); it’s nowhere near as
important as 7-10 but it does give us the first appearance of a prototype
version of the Kintobor Computer and allow Kitching to replace Millar’s
Sonic/Tails dynamic (Tails is a clueless prat and Sonic is a cock to him) with
his own which can best be described as the following: 80% of Sonic’s dialogue
is said just to amuse himself and Tails tries to impress him, Sonic teases
Tails when he messes up and Tails just sighs and shakes his head when Sonic
does. Sonic’s still a little overly rude, Kitching wouldn’t fully get to grips
with him until the next issue but he is starting to morph into a likeable
character with attitude rather than a dick, the class clown elements you’d
associate with Jaleel White and Ian Flynn are never present in StC instead he
stays a more personable, funnier, version of Marvel’s Quicksilver, he’s
impatient and impetuous (but then he’s a speedster), big-headed and sometimes
grumpy but charming and with his ‘tude’ coming across mostly via (usually) good
natured sarcasm or eye-rolling rather than being a turd to everyone for no
reason.

Super Sonic, the lead Sonic
strip from issue 7, is where things really start to be important and thus is
where we are finally going to start our proper Look At in this series of waffle:

2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary
and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting
so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100,
my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite
things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise-
and this is that Long Look At.

Welcome to my Long Look At
Sonic the Comic 1-100 my imaginary chums! Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic is
genuinely one of my happiest childhood memories, every fortnight I would
receive a new issue, at Christmas my mum would keep the

nearest issue back and
put it on top of my presents. Launching on 29th May 1993 it soon began treating
Sonic and his world the way I treated Sonic’s world: as a serious
action-adventure and with Sonic SatAM so inaccessible back them it was the only
place Sonic was getting that treatment (Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog only being
available in specialist shops most kids didn’t know existed and anyway it was
still mostly lost in goofy comedy). My original copies have been read half to
death but then that’s the advantage of scanned things, you’ll never read the
cover off a .cbr file, I obviously have all my issues ‘backed-up’ on my
computer and the first thing I wanted to do with a blog was Look At one of my
favourite comic series, Sonic the Comic won out, beating Transmetropolitan and
Savage Dragon, which should say a lot about my tastes. This 19 part Look At
will cover the first 100 issues, the ‘Robotnik Rules’ era of the book and the
era that was my childhood, I’m planning to do the latter part of the series for
some future date but I felt that at over 20 bloody parts this was long enough.
Part 1 here won’t be in the standard Look At format as I’m just going to use it
introduce everything and cover some issues that don’t need – or deserve – that
format. With that, are you sitting
comfortably? Then I’ll begin:

Thursday, 7 July 2016

On the 13th of June I turned 30, I’m not dealing with
this so instead I decided to both ignore and celebrate me lasting so long by
writing a whole bunch of top 30 countdown lists, thus all lists are made up of things released before June 13th 2016.

Second in my stream of Top
30s is one for Marvel’s Merry Mutants: The X-Men. Even though they rank lower
in my list of obsessions than Sonic the Hedgehog and came into my life slightly
later… I finished this list first because it required less watching of
television programmes, so it’s next. Being born in ’86 my X-Obsession was of
course born out of the three things that I reckon gave birth to more
X-Obsessions than any other – the ’93 cartoon series, the Toy Biz toyline and
the Konami arcade game, all of which happened to me around the same time (our 4
player X-Men Arcade Game cabinet was in our old Odeon cinema, the cinema is
still open – as a Premiere Cinema – and I still visit it regularly, and every
time I walk past where it stood I feel a little sad). Since then I’ve been
something of an X-Men… I’m a really obnoxious X-Fan, I shan’t lie to you, I’m
trying to be better but…no… I’m just an obnoxious X-Elitist and I hate myself
for it. You do NOT want to hear my opinion on any of the X-men movies and you
really don’t want to see one with me (well that isn’t Deadpool, I accept
Deadpool). That is exactly why I am doing this list, because no other Top X-Men
Stories countdown will satisfy me and because I want to share MY list which is
obviously better than the millions of other X-Men based lists on the internet
already because I compiled it and I know my X-Men dammit. Of course this
completely overlooks basic things like my completely biased towards stories
that deal with bigotry or me being utterly in love with Rogue but fuck that, I
know best.

Monday, 4 July 2016

Another weekend is over and
thus another bootsale has eaten up the disposal part of my income. I did
utterly great, in fact it was less like a bootsale and more just like a usual
shopping trip, only dirtier, dustier and all the shops were staffed by moaning
middle-aged irritants with sunburn. There’s usually a completive feeling to
bootsaling, and a kind of desperate searching amongst the crap for for things
that might interest you, but today I just strolled, nay, sauntered, ‘round,
picked up items I’d been looking for with little to no scrambling around boxes
of broken McDonald’s toys and naked Action Men and was even able to go back
later on and buy a couple of items I’d passed on the first time (usually the
chances of them still being there, and being the price you’re willing to pay,
are about zero) I even treated myself to a slice of cake – I am a fucking
hedonist.

And thus it’s time for
another Example of Crap I Waste My Money On. I‘ve kept it down to five this
time because I feel generous (and utterly depressed so I figure that my
enthusiasm glands won’t last for longer than five items). Also, night time
shots – because I couldn’t be arsed to get up and turn the other light on – so
enjoy moody toys. So are you sitting
comfortably? Then I’ll being: